Mars instead of Moon? Report demands NASA plans be overhauled
Published: 23 October, 2009, 01:59
Edited: 25 October, 2009, 03:39
A new report suggests that NASA should prepare a major overhaul in the national space exploration program, which could lead to boosting cooperation between nations in space, space expert John Manber told RT.
“The first thing that is really good news for Europeans and the Russian community is that we are going to keep our involvement, more than likely, in the [International] Space Station until 2020,” he said.
He went on to say that the Bush administration program had implied ending the cooperation in 2015 and allowing a perfectly good Space Station to fall into the Pacific Ocean.
“And second, we are going to rely on Russia to send our astronauts, during what is called the gap, to and from the Space Station for probably more than seven years,” he added.
Also, according to a review of the American space program written by the White House-appointed panel, instead of preparing to return to the Moon in 15 years, NASA should consider landings on asteroids or even on the moons of Mars.
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Well, I am all for international cooperation and avoiding a unilateralist mentality that raises costs and denies us the opportunity of improving international relations; but I am also for us reaching new impressive benchmarks. And in particular, I want us to leave low Earth orbit. We've been dithering there for over 40 years now. It is true that the Mir and the ISS were admirable accomplishments, but it is high time we commenced new longer-distance manned missions. I fear choosing Mars over the Moon may even further delay the renewed onset of such missions and would leave us with inadequate expertise in the particulars of human survival in isolation of frequent supplies from the Earth. Transit to Mars would be eased and made safer by intermediate steps that pioneered the perquisite technologies. The long-term utility of all of this, as far as I am concerned, is the spread of permanent human habitation beyond the Earth. Likewise, that will require intermediate steps, a lot of them, and it may be unrealistic to expect it could occur in my lifetime. I don't doubt that it's a long way off, but, besides an arguably indefensible degree of vanity, it is the truly valid justification for continued manned missions now that robots can basically do all the scientific surveying in a more cost effective manner than people can.
There is potentially a bit more to this than meets the eye. It has been suggested that a program capable of reaching the planets will, by default, be more than capable of reaching the moon, so no need to aim for the moon. The 'sugesstion' continues that by allowing the moon to be shared (possibly with India, china, and maybe Russia), the big prize - Mars - can be claimed along with all the potential resouces the planet has to offer. By taking 'one step back to take 3 steps forward' the US may be making a very astute move to secure future resources that will be out of the reach of other nations for some time. If true, very clever indeed.